“Jeez, has it been that long?” Flik asked grumpily. “No wonder I’m tired.”
“What do you mean?” Snow asked. “You know he’s missing?”
“Don’t worry,” Frank said. “We’ve been watching out for him. And if we really thought those bandits were going to kill him, we would have done something about it.”
“Bandits!” Snow was aghast. “What bandits?”
“I don’t know,” Frank said with a shrug. “Just some bandits. They’re gone now. And they didn’t kill him. So what’s the big deal?”
“Where is Duncan now?” Snow demanded. She was beginning to get irritated.
“The Idiot Prince didn’t want to come back with us,” Frank replied gruffly.
“Hey,” Snow said. “You know I don’t like it when you call him the Idiot Prince.”
“Sorry,” said Frank. “The Idiot didn’t want to come back with us.”
Snow bent over and pressed her forehead against Frank’s. “Enough with the insults,” she said with a quiet intensity that shook the normally unflappable dwarf.
“O-okay,” he muttered. Beads of sweat ran down his forehead and pooled at the tip of his bulbous nose. Flik and Frak tried to subtly inch away.
“Where is Duncan now?” Snow growled.
“Sturmhagen. He’s with a bunch of other guys who all call themselves Prince Charming,” Frank said. “They’re planning to rescue Cinderella from some witch’s tower or something.”
“Prince Charming rescuing Cinderella from a witch’s tower?” Snow repeated, backing off a bit. “What, are they doing a reenactment? I think they’re getting their stories mixed up.”
“No, this is for real. Real Cinderella, real witch.”
“Duncan will be killed,” Snow said. “I can’t believe you three left him there.”
“He ordered us to go,” Frank explained. “He thought it was most important for us to get word to you about where he was. And to give you this stick.” He handed Snow the odd twig he’d gotten from Duncan. “He thought it looked like a pony.”
Snow was flabbergasted. “I can’t believe you listened to him. The man has no sense!”
“But—”
“Listen, I love Duncan dearly, but he cannot be left unsupervised,” Snow said. “What was he thinking? Storming a tower? Facing a witch? And this stick is obviously shaped like a cat.”
“Um, I hate to say this,” Frank mumbled. “But I think they mentioned something about a giant, too.”
Snow was breathing in and out in short, rapid bursts of air, her normally pale white cheeks now pinker than the dwarfs had ever seen. Then, quite suddenly, she regained control of herself. She stood up tall and straight, stared icily at the dwarfs, and cleared her throat. She calmly slipped her feet back into her shoes.
“Gentlemen, get my wagon ready,” she said authoritatively. “You’re taking me to Duncan.”
In earlier times, the meek and quiet Snow White would never have been so demanding. But there was something about living with Duncan that brought out the ferociousness in her.
16
PRINCE CHARMING MEETS A PIECE OF WOOD
In order to make sure she’d be taken seriously as a villain, Zaubera had carefully noted the props and set pieces that appeared in every famous witch story she’d heard—cobwebs, broomsticks, jars of dried dead things—and then proceeded to fill her headquarters with as much of that stuff as she could find. Her stronghold was so cluttered with these bits of highly unoriginal witch decor that Liam had to be careful not to trip over a pumpkin or bump into a basket of poisoned apples as he snuck along the winding stone corridors.
Wall-mounted torches cast dancing shadows all about Liam as he dashed from floor to floor, peeking into one empty prison cell after another. Finally, on the tenth story, he peered through the small barred window of one wooden cell door and spotted a figure leaning up against the wall.
Liam rammed his shoulder against the door, busted it open, and charged into the cell.
“I’m Liam of Erinthia. I’m here to rescue you,” he announced triumphantly. He then added, with less enthusiasm, “And you are not Cinderella. You are a tree branch wrapped in a sheet.”
But how? he wondered as he paced the small cell. There was no sign of a struggle, nothing broken, no evidence of an escape tunnel, and the door had been locked. There was only one possible exit Cinderella could have used: the window. Gutsy move, Liam thought, impressed that the girl had freed herself, if a bit disappointed that there was nobody for him to rescue.
Fig. 33 NOT ELLA
He walked over to the window to see how far down it was to the ground, assuming Ella must have climbed, jumped, or somehow soared to freedom. From there, he got a perfect view of Duncan cutting his own belt off. “Cripes. Never mind the girl—I have to rescue those guys.”
Liam retraced his steps back downstairs. Or at least he tried to. The interior of Zaubera’s fortress was far more mazelike than he’d recalled, and he soon began wondering if he was on the right path. Many of the rooms were nearly identical.
“Okay, this is the room with the cauldron,” he said to himself. “So those stairs over there should lead down to the room with the skeleton on the wall.”
He darted down the steps.
“Crud,” he sputtered. “This one’s got a cauldron, too. How many cauldrons does one witch need?”
He ran like this, from corridor to room to staircase, until he turned a corner and found himself in a chamber that was stocked floor to ceiling with maps. There were framed maps hanging on walls, rolled maps sticking out of barrels, flat maps displayed on easels, and a huge map suspended by hooks overhead.
“I definitely didn’t pass through here before,” Liam said. He turned to dash back out of the room but stopped when one particular map caught his attention. It sat unrolled on a large desk with an open bottle of red ink and a still-wet feather quill lying next to it, as if it had been recently marked up. At its center, the map showed Zaubera’s enormous fortress, right at the foot of Mount Batwing. Southeast of that, the picture of a small tower was scratched out.
“That must be the tower the giant knocked down,” Liam said. “But what are all these others?” Several more towers were marked on the map, each in a different area of the surrounding forests and mountains. Scrawled beneath five of them was the word prisoner.
“Oh, this is excellent. There are more prisoners,” Liam murmured as a delighted awe washed over him. “This isn’t over yet.”
He rolled up the map and took it with him as he ran out to renew his search for the exit. At the end of the hall, he spotted a familiar-looking staircase and darted down to what he was pretty sure was the ground floor.
Aha! he said to himself. That chandelier was the first thing I saw when I came in. The large wrought-iron fixture suspended above the center of the room must have held seventy or eighty lit candles, but even so, it wasn’t bright enough to properly light a room so large. Liam rushed across the chamber, toward the exit. He hurtled past shelves lined with voodoo dolls and dead ravens. Past cabinets loaded with crystal balls. Past a life-size stuffed dragon. Hmm, Liam thought, don’t know how I managed to miss that before.
That was when the steam-spouting red dragon—which wasn’t stuffed with anything other than the yak meat it had eaten for lunch—lurched forward and snapped its gigantic jaws at Liam. He dove to the side just in time and instinctively reached for his sword. Unfortunately, in doing so, he lost his grip on the map.
As the parchment fell from Liam’s hand, the dragon’s big claw swatted it up into the air, where it unrolled and hovered kitelike above them. Liam jumped for the fluttering map, but the dragon whomped its tail hard against the floor, creating a gust of wind that sent the flying paper sailing across the cavernous chamber—over tables arrayed with beakers of glowing green liquids, past a dangling mobile of mummified monkey hands, and finally into a corner so dark and distant that it was practically in another kingdom.
“Oh, give me a break,” Liam yell
ed, and stomped his foot in anger. “Why is there a dragon here? Nobody mentioned a dragon!”
The dragon breathed out another whiff of flame, and Liam crouched behind some crates labeled EYE OF NEWT. The dragon darted its head forward and chomped through the crates, crushing them and sending an avalanche of tiny eyeballs spilling out onto the floor. Liam threw himself back against the wall. The beast snapped again. Liam spun to avoid those deadly jaws and took a stab at the dragon’s head with his dwarven sword. The monster was quicker than he expected, and it deftly bit down onto Liam’s blade.
“Hey, give that back!” Liam shouted as he tried to tug the weapon free. But the dragon wrestled the sword from his hand and spit it into another far-off corner of the chamber. Weaponless, Liam tried to make a run for it. But he slipped on the sea of newt eyeballs and slid across the floor until he was directly under the dragon’s belly.
“I could have done this by myself!” he yelled in frustration. “But of course Gustav had to run around like a lunatic!”
From below, Liam kicked both his feet up into the dragon’s gut.
“And Frederic is scared of his own shadow!”
The dragon craned its neck downward, trying to see under itself.
“And Duncan is cutting his own clothes off!”
Liam scrabbled across the floor and crawled out from underneath the dragon’s backside.
“And the girl turned out to be a tree!”
The dragon spotted him and swung its massive tail. The tail caught Liam in the chest, knocking him down, but he rolled to the side before it could come down on top of him for a second blow.
“And then somebody went and put a DRAGON in here!”
This was not Liam’s finest hour. The frustrations of the past several days had been slowly eating away at him and muddying his mind. On a normal day, had Liam been confronted by a fire-breathing dragon, he would have come up with a brilliant tactic for defeating the beast. He would have lured the dragon into a tight spot to trap it, or maybe found some clever way to make the huge chandelier overhead fall down onto the monster. But this day? This day he decided to kick the beast in the tail and yell, “Take that, dumb dragon!”
The dragon, as you might suspect, was not impressed. It roared, spun around to face him, and let loose a wide plume of fiery breath. Liam leapt to the side, but not fast enough to keep his long cape from catching fire.
“Bad move! Bad move!” Liam panted as he ran in circles, trying desperately to remove his burning cape. When untying the cape proved too much of a challenge, he dropped to the floor and rolled to extinguish the blaze—narrowly avoiding another chomp of the dragon’s jaws in the process.
Fig. 34 Red DRAGON
There’s nothing like being engulfed in flames to snap you out of a daze and get you focused on the task at hand. Once his cape fire was out, Liam dodged a swipe of the dragon’s claws, then ran straight at the beast and leapt up onto its head. As the startled dragon coughed out a cloud of black smoke, Liam spun himself around and straddled the monster’s thick neck. Holding on tightly, he spoke directly into the dragon’s ear: “That’s right, dragon, I’m in charge now. Let’s get that map.”
Placing his hands on the dragon’s horns like they were handlebars, Liam kicked his heel hard into the dragon’s neck and attempted to steer the great beast into the corner where the map had landed. Alas, Liam overestimated his dragon-riding skills. The monster galloped at high speed directly toward the big doors that led back outside—back to the other princes. And honestly, those guys didn’t need any more trouble than they already had.
17
PRINCE CHARMING STILL HAS NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON
Well, there it is,” Lila whispered.
She and Ella pulled whiplike branches aside as they worked their way through the bramble toward the tower. Like the one that Ella (and Rapunzel before her) had been held in, this tower was about ninety feet of white-streaked gray stone sticking straight up out of the ground. And again, there were no doors—just one small window at the top. Ella tiptoed closer.
She froze when she heard voices from behind the tower. They were high-pitched, burbling, almost wet-sounding voices that, had Ella gotten around more, she would have immediately recognized as goblin voices. Goblins always sound as if they are talking with a mouth full of gelatin. As awful sounds go, there’s nothing quite as disgusting as being serenaded by a goblin choir. But like I said, Ella didn’t realize she was hearing a goblin conversation; she heard the sloppy gurgling sounds and thought somebody was drowning.
“Someone needs help!” Ella shouted. “Don’t worry, I’m coming!”
“Wait,” Lila said. “Those are—”
But Ella was already tearing around to the back of the tower. She came to an abrupt stop when she noticed that: (a) there was no body of water in sight, and (b) there were three smallish green-skinned creatures with wooden spears pointed in her direction.
“Oh, my goodness,” Ella said. “What are you?”
“What are we?” one of the goblins gurgled. “Do you know how insulting that is?”
“Of course I know what you are,” Ella lied, realizing she’d offended a group of creatures with very sharp sticks. “You didn’t let me finish. I was going to ask, ‘What are you … doing here?’ I think you were rude for interrupting me.”
“You paused,” the goblin said. “I thought you were done.”
“That’s no excuse,” Ella said haughtily. She decided to simply act as if she belonged there and hope the creatures would buy it. “And you still haven’t answered my question.”
“We’re guarding the tower,” a goblin said. “Who are you supposed to be, anyway?”
“She is Ruffian the Blue,” Lila said as she ran up next to Ella. “The infamous bounty hunter. See her blue dress.”
“Ruffian the Blue?” the head goblin questioned. “I figured he was a man.”
“Why?” Ella said, narrowing her eyes. “You think a woman can’t be the world’s best bounty hunter?”
The two smaller goblins shook their heads rapidly.
“Who’s the little human, then?” the lead goblin asked.
“Oh, she, uh … she captured me,” Lila offered.
“That’s right, I work for the witch,” Ella said. “I’m delivering my new prisoner to this tower.”
“Prisoner?” the head goblin asked skeptically. “But she’s not even tied up or anything. And she was running about twelve yards behind you.”
“She doesn’t need to tie me up,” Lila said quickly. “I’m totally terrified of her. If you saw the things this lady could do, you would not try to run either.”
The two goblins in the back goggled at Ella in trepidation. Their eyes bulged audibly, making a rather disgusting sucking sound. Their leader, however, was still doubtful. He squinted at Ella. “If you work for the witch,” he asked, speaking at a slow and deliberate pace, “can you tell us her name?”
Lila shot Ella an expectant look. Ella took a deep breath. She had no idea what the witch’s name was. But she was willing to bet that these loopy little creatures didn’t have the information either. “Can you tell me her name?” she asked.
The three goblins, who had only met with their boss for about five minutes before she screamed at them and sent them away to guard the tower, huddled together and whispered among themselves. It sounded like a pug snuffling into a pot of stew. After a minute or so—and several instances of one goblin slapping another in frustration—they broke the huddle and faced Ella again.
“Um, we’re gonna go with… Wendy,” the first goblin announced.
“Excellent,” Ella said, having no clue whether they were correct or not. “She’ll be very happy to hear that you got that right.”
The three goblins all sighed with relief.
“But she’s not going to be very happy to hear that I found the three of you on the wrong side of the tower,” Ella continued in a sinister tone, doing her best impression of her stepmother. The goblins j
umped to attention. “You were supposed to be guarding the tower. Why weren’t you on the side with the window?”
“Well, the prisoner—,” the first goblin started.
“The bard, you mean,” Ella prompted, hoping the goblin would confirm what she already believed about the witch’s plot.
“Yep, that’s right, the bard,” the goblin said. “He wrote that famous song. You know the one.” He signaled the other goblins, and the trio began singing, “Listen, dear hearts, to the tale I confess, the tale of a girl who needed a dress—”
It was the most horrible sound Ella and Lila had ever heard.
“Stop! Stop!” Ella cried. “Yes, I know the song. Just finish telling me why you’re not out there keeping an eye on him.”
“Well, the bard kept shooting these weird little thingies at us,” the first goblin said sheepishly, avoiding eye contact with Ella.
“I’m not sure how he was doing it, but they flew real fast and stung real hard,” the second goblin added. “He must have a slingshot up there or something.” The creature handed Ella a tiny ear-shaped piece of carved ivory.
Ella had seen enough private concerts with Frederic to recognize the tuning knob of a mandolin when she saw one.
“We didn’t want to get hurt anymore, so we moved to this side,” the first goblin finished.
“That is so irresponsible,” Ella scolded. “How do you know the prisoner hasn’t escaped while you’ve been back here?”
Lila shook her head sadly. She pointed at Ella with one hand and made a throat-slashing motion with the other. One of the smaller goblins fell flat on his back and had to be helped up by the others.
“We’re going to have to check,” Ella said. “How do we get up there?”
Anxious, the goblins retrieved an extremely tall ladder from the nearby trees. They dragged it to the front of the tower and, groaning under its weight, stood it up until its top rested against the lone high windowsill. The first goblin began to climb, but Ella put her hand on his head to stop him. She quivered a bit at the damp-rug feel under her palm, but stayed in character.